So here I am in Portland, at OSCON 2011. I’m looking forward to a week of incredible demos, talks, and free stuff. The schedule is pretty packed but I’ll try my best to shoot off a post or two when I come up for some air

If you’re using Maya in conjunction with any other 3d systems, you’ve no-doubt been tripped up by having your working units set incorrectly. For years now I’ve been annoyed that the system seems to always default to centimeters while I’m generally working on projects that are measured in meters.

Today I’ve finally come to a solution easier than editing your UserPrefs script! If you check out the options for the File->New command, you’ll see that you can actually set the default unit to whichever you’d like. So unless you have an affinity for hours of leery-eyed aggravation, make sure you set your working units!

For a few weeks now I’ve been working on an application that will import OpenStreetMap data into a MySQL database. Osmosis is already a mature piece of software with a number of features, but it presents itself as centered around PostgreSQL. Given the popularity of Postgres around the OpenStreetMap community, this pg-centricity makes good sense. Unfortunately, it doesn’t satisfy everyone’s needs and, as such, getting up and going with Osmosis and MySQL proved to be a task that just wasn’t panning out for me.

So I wrote my own. Its extremely simple, just a few files, and doesn’t even use a standard SAX parser to read the XML data (utilizes straight-up java.lang.String functions) as its deflated. Of course, this means that bugs are ripe for the picking but relatively easy to get to the bottom of. At this point, most of the glaring bugs seem to have been taken care of, so I’ve decided to put it up on GitHub for everyone to have a look at. The license, for those interested in reading past the words “Free and Open Source” is GPLv3.

I’m still hammering away at the details and if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll have seen that I’ve been having some seriousfun with MySQL bulk inserts using LOAD DATA in the past few hours. The performance numbers are impressive (Osmosis imports take closer to a week, but also import a more comprehensive view of the data. Some columns are currently omitted from OSMGenerator), but I’m still not satisfied!

I recently wrote a quick blurb on how to get a load balancer setup quickly and easily under Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but this morning I found myself needing to do some work on a train where my internet connectivity was shoddy at best. I thought I’d remembered reading on the website that Balance worked on OS X and other Unix-like operating systems, but no directions were provided. Luckily, the standard commands worked out pretty well and it was quite simple to get running.

This completes the setup of balance, now its just a matter of running it. Examples of use can be seen in the excellent PDF that they’ve included with their distribution as well as in my earlier post on how to get setup in Red Hat